Search Results (11)

According to some, humanity’s search to answer the question “What is the meaning of life?” fuels the creative fires that forge all of civilization’s great religious, spiritual, and philosophical texts. But how seriously should we take the question? In the following paper, I provide an implexic genealogical analysis of the cognitive structures that make the very articulation of the question possible. After outlining my procedure, my paper begins by explaining the main components of a genealogical inquiry. Next, I examine Camus’s and Nagel’s respective analyses of philosophical absurdity, paying particular attention to their different evaluations of avatars of the absurd, such as the myth of Sisyphus. Finally, I demonstrate how we may complete Nagel’s solution to the absurd (which counsels that whenever the seeming meaninglessness of life is raised in consciousness, we address it with an ironic smile) by providing an evolutionary pathway of how the cognitive scaffolding required to ask the question about life’s meaning arose. I argue that by reframing philosophical absurdity, we see the phenomenon in a different light. In this very reframing, we may become free from the malaise often connected to avatars for the absurd. Full article

The coherence and indeed the reality of the sophists as a philosophical school or movement has been contested and debated in modern scholarship, with inconclusive results. While their collective identity, not to mention their exemplarity, is subject to probing scrutiny, we usually have a fairly good idea of which historical figures we mean when we speak of the sophists. However, the case of Critias, the most infamous of the Thirty Tyrants of Athens, is particularly challenging since he does not seem to fit the professional profile of the other figures who are generally recognized as sophists and with whom his fragments have been edited and collected. This essay will briefly reconsider Critias’ candidacy as one of the ancient Greek sophists, not on the basis of what might be conjecturally reconstituted as his own philosophy, but rather on the basis of his association with the notion of the Greek or Sophistic Enlightenment. This notion and the periodization that it implies will be the focus of attention. Full article

A good life combines lively living and a good purpose, which depend on action results and consequences. They supervene upon the action results that create life’s meaning. A good life is never evil because evil deeds, as such, are not part of the agent’s action repertoire. Agents cannot claim them as their own; if they do, dishonest hypocrisy and social stigmatization follow. But, when action results are good, the purpose is good, too. One cannot realize an evil purpose by acting morally. I argue against the idea that a passive, dreaming life could be a good life. I discuss specific kinds of religious life that follow a monastic rule. A good life may not be happy, although it tends to be so. I discuss various theories of happiness, including the traditional Socratic view that virtue and virtue only make an agent happy. I conclude that a good life is not the same as a virtuous life; hence, a good life can be unhappy. To conclude, I discuss personal autonomy in social life. A good life requires that one’s actions and goals are one’s own, but such ownership is hard to realize because of a social life’s complicated and demanding mutual dependencies. I conclude that full ownership is fiction, so a good life is a social life. Full article

To guide their characteristic straight-line orientation away from the dung pile, ball-rolling dung beetles steer according to directional information provided by celestial cues, which, among the most relevant are the sun and polarised skylight. Most studies regarding the use of celestial cues and their influence on the orientation system of the diurnal ball-rolling beetle have been performed on beetles of the tribe Scarabaeini living in open habitats. These beetles steer primarily according to the directional information provided by the sun. In contrast, Sisyphus fasciculatus, a species from a different dung-beetle tribe (the Sisyphini) that lives in habitats with closely spaced trees and tall grass, relies predominantly on directional information from the celestial pattern of polarised light. To investigate the influence of visual ecology on the relative weight of these cues, we studied the orientation strategy of three different tribes of dung beetles (Scarabaeini, Sisyphini and Gymnopleurini) living within the same biome, but in different habitat types. We found that species within a tribe share the same orientation strategy, but that this strategy differs across the tribes; Scarabaeini, living in open habitats, attribute the greatest relative weight to the directional information from the sun; Sisyphini, living in closed habitats, mainly relies on directional information from polarised skylight; and Gymnopleurini, also living in open habitats, appear to weight both cues equally. We conclude that, despite exhibiting different body size, eye size and morphology, dung beetles nevertheless manage to solve the challenge of straight-line orientation by weighting visual cues that are particular to the habitat in which they are found. This system is however dynamic, allowing them to operate equally well even in the absence of the cue given the greatest relative weight by the particular species. Full article

The tragedy of the commons is a primary contributing factor in ensuring that humanity makes no serious inroads in averting climate change. As a recent Canadian politician pointed out, we could shut down the Canadian economy tomorrow, and it would make no measurable difference in global greenhouse gas emissions. When coordinated effort is required, it would seem that doing the “right thing” alone is irrational: it will harm oneself with no positive consequences as a result. Such is the tragedy. And that is the challenge that we take up here. Though Garrett Hardin suggests that the solution is a governmental process that rules over all contenders, since a world government seems unlikely before the planet hits the tippy point, we suggest an educational initiative instead: one that holds a mirror up to the behaviour of individuals, rather than to the behaviour of individuals in groups. Such an educational initiative would be focused on priming individuals to keep constant track of what they do as individuals as opposed to focusing on the behaviour of humanity in general. Such an educational initiative would focus on tackling the “problem solvers” rather than just “the problem”. Full article

Single-electron tunneling transistors (SETs) and boxes (SEBs) exploit the phenomenon of Coulomb blockade to achieve unprecedented charge sensitivities. Single-electron boxes, however, despite their simplicity compared to SETs, have rarely been used for practical applications. The main reason for that is that unlike a SET where the gate voltage controls conductance between the source and the drain, an SEB is a two terminal device that requires either an integrated SET amplifier or high-frequency probing of its complex admittance by means of radio frequency reflectometry (RFR). The signal to noise ratio (SNR) for a SEB is small, due to its much lower admittance compared to a SET and thus matching networks are required for efficient coupling ofSEBs to an RFR setup. To boost the signal strength by a factor of $\sqrt{N}$ (due to a random offset charge) SEBs can be connected in parallel to form arrays sharing common gates and sources. The smaller the size of the SEB, the larger the charging energy of a SEB enabling higher operation temperature, and using devices with a small footprint (<0.01 µm²), a large number of devices (>1000) can be assembled into an array occupying just a few square microns. We show that it is possible to design SEB arrays that may compete with an SET in terms of sensitivity. In this, we tested SETs using RF reflectometry in a configuration with no DC through path (“DC-decoupled SET” or DCD SET) along with SEBs connected to the same matching network. The experiment shows that the lack of a path for a DC current makes SEBs and DCD SETs highly electrostatic discharge (ESD) tolerant, a very desirable feature for applications. We perform a detailed analysis of experimental data on SEB arrays of various sizes and compare it with simulations to devise several ways for practical applications of SEB arrays and DCD SETs. Full article

Recent reports have revealed the rich long-lived Mossbauer phenomenon of ^93mNb, in which it has long been speculated that the delocalized ^93mNb undergoes Bose-Einstein condensation following an increase in the ^93mNb density beyond the threshold of 10¹² cm⁻³ at room temperature. We now report on the superradiant Rayleigh of the M4 γ at 662 keV scattered into end-fire modes along the long axis of the sample, as evidence of Bose-Einstein condensation. We observed the Arago (Poisson’s) spot in order to demonstrate a near-field γ-ray diffraction from a mm-sized γ source, as well as a γ interference beyond the Huygens-Fresnel principle. During the 107-day monitoring period, seven Sisyphus cycles of mode hopping appeared in the superradiance, which demonstrates the optomechanic bistabilty provided by the collective interaction between the spinor quantum fluid and the impinging γs. Condensate-light interaction produces a pm matter-wave grating to become a Fabry-Pérot resonator with a Q-factor on the order of 10²⁰, from which end-fired γs lase. Full article

This article is an important addition to my previous work of integrating Jungian and Lacanian psychoanalysis (see Complexes Tickling the $ubject). A main focus of this article is to use Zizek’s interpretation of Lacan’s writing on desire and drive in relation to my Heideggerian interpretation of Jung. As a result, this article is an important contribution to the literature because it shows the importance of the transcendent function; complexes and the Rosarium Philosophorum to elucidate the ethics of desire and drive. This article shows how Heidegger’s work in Being and Time and his interpretation of Nietzsche is important to detail the process of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Nietzsche’s books; Human All Too Human and The Gay Science will also be discussed as well as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and Zizek’s writing on the cunning of reason; Kantian ethics; beyond the pleasure principle; Kierkegaard; Sisyphus; anxiety; Hitchcock; Gelassenheit; the Gospel of Matthew and error as a fundamental passage to truth. Full article

The primary design goal of (r)evolutionary NG-PON1&2 was the provisioning of an ever increasing capacity to cope with video-dominated traffic and handle the explosion of mobile data traffic by means of offloading. Recently, however, questions on the future of “post NG-PON2” have surfaced whether to shift its research focus to business and operation related aspects and move access technology into a substantially different direction than continued capacity upgrades. In fact, recent studies indicate that ultimately the major factor limiting the performance of 4G mobile networks is latency rather than capacity of the backhaul. In this paper, we review recently proposed low-latency techniques for NG-PONs that require architectural modifications at the remote node or distribution fiber level and highlight advanced network coding and real-time polling based low-latency techniques that can be implemented in software, enable NG-PONs to carry higher traffic loads and thereby extend their lifetime, and maintain the passive nature of existent optical distribution networks. Furthermore, we elaborate on emerging trends and open challenges for future post NG-PON2 research. To better understand their true potential, we put them into a wider non-technical and historical perspective leading up to a sustainable Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) economy and its underlying Energy Internet. Full article